WAR

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Book Review of WAR:

Dave Boles's "WAR" is a relentless, incantatory indictment of humanity's oldest habit, and it announces its intentions from the first lines: this is not a poem interested in subtlety or in offering readers a comfortable distance from its subject. Structured as an extended free-verse meditation, the piece returns again and again to a single, damning refrain—"We are a species that relishes / the extermination of its own"—until the phrase becomes less an observation than an accusation, hammered into the reader with the insistence of a drumbeat.

The poem's central argument is stark: war is not an aberration in human behavior but its defining expression, one that has simply grown more sophisticated over time. Boles traces this evolution from literal battlefields to what he calls "economic WARS," in which no bombs fall but families are nonetheless destroyed—parents losing jobs, children shipped off to relatives because a household can no longer hold together. This is one of the poem's more original moves: extending the definition of war beyond bullets and missiles to include the slow violence of policy and deprivation. Starving newborns "abandoned / dying / quietly" and unmarked graves filling cemetery after cemetery become, in Boles's framing, casualties of a war that never gets called by that name.

The poem's imagery is its greatest strength. Boles favors short, fragmented lines that isolate single images—"charred / flesh," "blackened / faces," "soft cries / of newborns"—forcing the reader to sit with each detail rather than let it blur into abstraction. This visual choppiness mimics the disorientation and horror it describes; the eye stumbles down the page the way a mind might stumble through grief. The recurring image of "the eyes of the innocent," which opens and closes the poem, gives the piece a kind of symmetry, suggesting that the dead will ultimately bear witness to the species that destroyed them. It's a haunting bookend, and it lands with real force.

Boles is also sharp when he turns to language itself as a mechanism of violence. His section on "collateral damage" is the poem's most pointed passage, dissecting how euphemism allows societies to abstract away suffering. "The human race / evolves its WAR / just one step / further / with the addition / of the cunning / phrase / collateral damage," he writes, and then insists, correctly, that this linguistic sleight of hand changes nothing for "the parents of / children / blackened / charred." It's a genuinely effective rhetorical move—naming the naming, so to speak—and it's one of the moments where the poem's anger feels most precisely aimed rather than diffusely spread.

The political critique, too, has bite. Boles's lines about politicians who speak of "WAR / of Poverty" while "adding more servants / to their current / staff" skewer hypocrisy with a bitter, almost sardonic edge that briefly shifts the poem's register from lament to satire. It's a welcome variation in tone, even if brief, and shows that Boles has more than one register available to him.

That said, readers should know what they're getting into. This is a poem built almost entirely on repetition and assertion rather than narrative, argument, or counterpoint. The refrain, while powerful in its early appearances, risks losing some of its charge by the poem's end simply through sheer accumulation—repetition can deepen meaning or flatten it, and "WAR" sometimes teeters between the two. Similarly, the poem's central claim—that humans are uniquely and essentially drawn to exterminating their own kind—is stated with total conviction but never seriously interrogated. There's no space here for complicating ideas: no acknowledgment of resistance, reconciliation, or the human capacities that push back against violence, no interior voice that disagrees with the poem's thesis. Readers looking for nuance, ambiguity, or a dialectical treatment of war and peace will find the poem's certainty either bracing or exhausting, depending on temperament.

The lack of narrative throughline may also test some readers' patience. "WAR" doesn't tell a story so much as circle one theme from multiple angles—military, economic, political, linguistic—which gives it thematic breadth but limits its capacity to build toward change or revelation beyond its foretold, bleak conclusion. The ending, which envisions the "circle of death / complete" and a species that "extinguished / itself," is the poem's logical destination, but it arrives with little surprise, since the poem has been insisting on this outcome from its opening lines.

Still, what Boles sacrifices in nuance he gains in force. "WAR" is not a poem that asks to be admired for craft alone; it asks to be felt, and on that count it largely succeeds. Its unflinching imagery and its willingness to say plainly what more mannered poetry might only imply give it a raw, sermon-like power. Readers drawn to poetry of witness and protest—work in the tradition of unflinching moral address rather than lyrical restraint—will likely find "WAR" a compelling, uncomfortable read, and one worth sitting with.